The Representation of the People Bill, which doubles the electorate, giving the Parliamentary vote to about six million women and placing soldiers and sailors over 19 on the register (with a proxy vote for those on service abroad), simplifies the registration system, greatly reduces the cost of elections, and provides that they shall all take place on one day, and by a redistribution of seats tends to give a vote the same value everywhere passed both Houses yesterday and received the Royal assent.

Westminster, Wednesday night.

Except as to the particular shape in which it was staged, and as to some of its accesseries, the final act tonight in the progress of the Franchise Bill came out pretty much as had been foreseen - namely, in the elimination from the bill of the immediate application alike of P.R. and the alternative vote.

In the case of the second of those reforms the excision took the form of a clean cut frank, unqualified, and avowed, there could be no mistake as to either the intention or the thoroughness of the deletion. P.R. on the other hand, was not completely lost. The sacrifice in this instance was mitigated by an arrangement proposed by the Lords and accepted by the Commons under which the Government are pledged to provide facilities in the coming session for the consideration of a new scheme of proportional voting, limited and experimental in its scope.

While some of the peers were doubtful of the value of the compromise on P.R. a considerable body of members in the Commons, led by Mr Austen Chamberlain, refused to be persuaded that the hated principle was not actually winning an out-and-out triumph. Possibly this section would have taken a less despairing view of the position had they been witnesses in the Lords a little earlier in the day of the suspicious demeanour of their opponents in that House towards the suggested compromise.

Speaking as one "profoundly and even passionately opposed" to P.R., Mr. Chamberlain fairly startled his old friends by the vehemence with which he denounced, not only such iniquitous electoral devices, but also their title champions - "legislators with no elections of their own to face and with no constituents to woo". Such white-hot emotion on so relatively innocuous a proposal was smilingly declared by Mr. Balfour to be altogether bewildering, except perhaps on the assumption that Mr. Chamberlain had become a leader of the Single Chamber party.

The Final Journey.

Apart from the ardour displayed by Mr. Chamberlain in this sacred cause, feeling on the whole seemed not unfavourable to the suggested compromise.

If danger of further conflict threatened it was rather on the question of the alternative vote, which the Lords had again struck out of the bill by an overwhelming majority. On this question, acting on a hint thrown out by Mr. Asquith, Sir Willoughby Dickinson now moved and Mr. Arthur Henderson seconded a proposal with the object of giving to the principle of the alternative vote a similar opportunity of acceptance by the House in the coming season as that proposed to be found for proportional representation.

Some difficulty was experienced by Ministers in devising a plausible argument against the proposed equality of treatment. According to Mr. Bonar Law, the chief object lay in the hostility of the other House and the rising passion that might be engendered if the bill were kept travelling backwards and forwards between the two Houses. "I don't believe the country cares twopence one way or the other about either proportional representation or the alternative vote", the Unionist leader declared amid general cries of protest, "but it does care about the passing of the bill".

On a division the deletion of the alternative vote was accepted by 181 to 166, and shortly afterwards, on a further division, the Lords' amendment on proportional representation was confirmed by 221 votes to 111. Thus approved in the form in which it had last left the Lords, the bill eventually went back on its final journey to the other House, there to receive the Royal assent.